When the phase of active conquest was over, the Arabs directed their energies to various branches of learning with great eagerness, and they translated all that they acquired of Greek, Persian and Indian manuscripts. The Christians, Jews, and Nestorians played a large part in this work.

Within one and a half centuries of the appearance of Islam, Baghdad came under the rule of the Abbassids and Cordova under the Umayyads, and these became world centers for learning and particularly for medicine. Among the famous physicians of Ummayyad times were Ibn Uthal and Abu al-Hakam al-Dimashqi. Ibn Uthal was a Christian, and physician to the first Umayyad caliph, Mu'awiyah. He was skilled in the science of poisons, and during the reign of Mu'awiyah many prominent men and princes died mysteriously. Ibn Uthal was later killed in revenge. Abu al-Hakam al-Dimashqi was a Christian physician skilled in therapeutics. He was the physician to the second Umayyad caliph, Yazid.

Translation into Arabic began under the rule of the Umayyads in the time of Prince Khalid ibn Yazid. Prince Khalid was interested in alchemy, and so he employed the services of Greek philosophers who were living in Egypt. He rewarded them lavishly, and they translated Greek and Egyptian books on chemistry, medicine and the stars.

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Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. - Mark Twain.

Archaeologists have discovered skeletons lying in their death pose inside an island fort in Sweden. The …

At the site of an ancient island fort in Sweden, archaeologists have uncovered the victims of a sudden massacre, whose bodies were frozen in time for centuries much like the victims of Pompeii. Researchers think hundreds of people once lived in single-family stone houses within the walled settlement on Öland, a long narrow island off the southeast coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. But the fifth-century fort seems to have been left in ruins after an ambush, recent excavations suggest. "I don't think anyone dared to go near it for a very long time," Helene Wilhelmson, an osteologist at Lund University said in a video released by the school. [8 Grisly Archaeological Discoveries] "It's more of a frozen moment than you normally see in archaeology," Wilhelmson added. "It's like Pompeii. Something terrible happened and everything just stopped." In an initial investigation at the site in 2010, researchers found jewelry boxes with finely-crafted gilded broaches and sets of beads, hinting at former occupation. Later, researchers found traces of a house within the fort. In the doorway, they uncovered two feet peeking out, Wilhelmson said. The archaeologists eventually excavated the full skeleton, which had signs of blunt force trauma to the head and shoulder. So far the researchers say they have found five sets of human remains, all belonging to people who seem to have met a sudden death. "I think they were surprised," Wilhelmson said, explaining that two of bodies were found lying close to each other by the door as if they were running out to escape when they were killed. The arrangement of the dead bodies is especially unusual for a period when people in the region traditionally burned their dead on a funeral pyre. The archaeologists are using 3D modeling to reconstruct the 1,500-year-old crime scene. The technique will give them a chance to see, simultaneously, all the bodies where they fell even though archaeologists have removed the skeletons one by one. "We never have the complete scene exposed at the same moment, but using the 3D models we can actually recreate the complete scene," Lund University archaeologist Nicolo Dell'Unto said in a video. The researchers think they are likely to find several more skeletons as their work at the site continues, according to the university.

Archaeologists uncover entrance to important tomb from reign of warrior-king Alexander the Great Archaeologists in Greecehave discovered a vast tomb that they believe is connected with the reign of the warrior-king Alexander the Great, who conquered vast swathes of the ancient world between Greece and India. The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander's generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece's prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as "clearly extremely significant". A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb. They ruled out the possibility that the tomb could be that of Alexander - the emperor is believed to have been buried in Egypt after he died of a fever in Babylon in 323BC. The tomb was found in Greece's northern Macedonia region, from where Alexander began to forge his empire. "It is certain that we stand before an especially significant finding. The land of Macedonia continues to move and surprise us, revealing its unique treasures, which combine to form the unique mosaic of Greek history of which all Greeks are very proud," said Mr Samaras. Archaeologists, who began excavating the site in 2012, hope to fully explore the tomb by the end of the month to determine exactly who was buried there. The site is being guarded by police while archaeologists continue their excavations. Catherine Peristeri, the head of the ancient monuments department in northern Greece, said some of Alexander's generals and admirals had links to the area around the ancient city of Amphipolis. It was also the place where his wife, Roxana, and son, were killed in 311BC by Cassander, a Macedonian general who fought over the empire after Alexander the Great's death. Situated about 65 miles northeast of Greece's second-biggest city, Thessaloniki, the tomb appears to be the largest ever discovered in Greece. It probably belonged to "a prominent Macedonian of that era," a culture ministry official told Reuters. The tomb, which consists of white marble decorations and frescoed walls, was partially destroyed during the Roman occupation of Greece. Amphipolis was founded as an Athenian colony in 437 BC but conquered by Philip II of Macedon, Alexander's father, in 357 BC. Alexander the Great single-handedly changed the history of the ancient world with a lightning pace of conquest. Born in Pella, the ancient capital of Macedonia in 356 BC, he was educated by the philosopher Aristotle. When his father was assassinated in 336 BC, Alexander set about consolidating his hold on the kingdom of Macedonia before embarking on the conquest of the powerful Persian Empire. He led his army to victories across Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt, establishing an empire that eventually stretched from the Danube to the frontiers of India.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Researchers at a meeting here say they have found the oldest tools made by human ancestors—stone flakes dated to 3.3 million years ago. That’s 700,000 years older than the oldest-known tools to date, suggesting that our ancestors were crafting tools several hundred thousand years before our genus Homo arrived on the scene. If correct, the new evidence could confirm disputed claims for very early tool use, and it suggests that ancient australopithecines like the famed “Lucy” may have fashioned stone tools, too.Until now, the earliest known stone tools had been found at the site of Gona in Ethiopia and were dated to 2.6 million years ago. These belonged to a tool technology known as the Oldowan, so called because the first examples were found more than 80 years ago at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by famous paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Then, in 2010, researchers working at the site of Dikika in Ethiopia—where an australopithecine child was also discovered—reported cut marks on animal bones dated to 3.4 million years ago; they argued that tool-using human ancestors made the linear marks. The claim was immediately controversial, however, and some argued that what seemed to be cut marks might have been the result of trampling by humans or other animals. Without the discovery of actual tools, the argument seemed likely to continue without resolution.Now, those missing tools may have been found. In a talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society here, archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery of numerous tools at the site of Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 1000 kilometers from Olduvai Gorge. In 2011, Harmand’s team was seeking the site where a controversial human relative called Kenyanthropus platyops had been discovered in 1998. They took a wrong turn and stumbled upon another part of the area, called Lomekwi, near where Kenyanthropus had been found. The researchers spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.More tools were discovered under the ground, including so-called cores from which human ancestors struck off sharp flakes; the team was even able to fit one of the flakes back to its original core, showing that a hominin had crafted and then discarded both core and flake in this spot. The researchers returned for more digging the following year and have now uncovered nearly 20 well-preserved flakes, cores, and anvils apparently used to hold the cores as the flakes were struck off, all sealed in sediments that provided a secure context for dating. An additional 130 pieces have also been found on the surface, according to the talk.“The artifacts were clearly knapped [created by intentional flaking] and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks,” Harmand told the meeting. Analysis of the tools showed that they had been rotated as flakes were struck off, which is also how Oldowan tools were crafted. The Lomekwi tools were somewhat larger than the average Oldowan artifacts, however. Dating of the sediments using paleomagnetic techniques—which track reversals in Earth’s magnetic field over time and have been used on many hominin finds from the well-studied Lake Turkana area—put them at about 3.3 million years old.Although very recent research has now pushed back the origins of the genus Homo to as early as 2.8 million years ago, the tools are too old to have been made by the first fully fledged humans, Harmand said in her talk. The most likely explanation, she concluded, was that the artifacts were made either by australopithecines similar to Lucy or by Kenyanthropus. Either way, toolmaking apparently began before the birth of our genus. Harmand and her colleagues propose to call the new tools the Lomekwian technology, she said, because they are too old and too distinct from Oldowan implements to represent the same technology.Researchers who have seen the tools in person are enthusiastic about the claim. The finds are “very exciting,” says Alison Brooks, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “They could not have been created by natural forces … [and] the dating evidence is fairly solid.” She agrees that the tools are too early to have been made by Homo, suggesting that “technology played a major role in the emergence of our genus.”The claim also looks good to paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences here, a leader of the team that found cut marks on the Dikika animal bones. (At the meeting, another team member presented new arguments for the cut marks’ authenticity.) “With the cut marks from Dikika we had the victim” of the stone tools, Alemseged says. “Harmand’s discovery gives us the smoking gun.”

Ten years ago, an Irish pub owner was clearing land for a driveway when his digging exposed an unusually large flat stone. The stone obscured a dark gap underneath. He grabbed a flashlight to peer in."I shot the torch in and saw the gentleman, well, his skull and bones," Bertie Currie, the pub owner, said this week.The remains of three humans, in fact, were found behind McCuaig’s Bar in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. And though police were called, it was not, as it turned out, a crime scene.Instead, what Currie had stumbled over was an ancient burial that, after a recent DNA analysis, challenges the traditional centuries-old account of Irish origins. Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queens University Belfast have sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans. (Trinity College Dublin) From as far back as the 16th century, historians taught that the Irish are the descendants of the Celts, an Iron Age people who originated in the middle of Europe and invaded Ireland somewhere between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C. That story has inspired innumerable references linking the Irish with Celtic culture. The Nobel-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats titled a book “Celtic Twilight.” Irish songs are deemed “Celtic” music. Some nationalists embraced the Celtic distinction. And in Boston, arguably the most Irish city in the United States, the owners of the NBA franchise dress their players in green and call them the Celtics.Yet the bones discovered behind McCuaig’s tell a different story of Irish origins, and it does not include the Celts.“The DNA evidence based on those bones completely upends the traditional view,” said Barry Cunliffe, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Oxford who has written books on the origins of the people of Ireland.DNA research indicates that the three skeletons found behind McCuaig's are the ancestors of the modern Irish and they predate the Celts and their purported arrival by 1,000 years or more. The genetic roots of today's Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived.“The most striking feature” of the bones, according to the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal, is how much their DNA resembles that of contemporary Irish, Welsh and Scots. (By contrast, older bones found in Ireland were more like Mediterranean people, not the modern Irish.)Radiocarbon dating shows that the bones discovered at McCuaig's go back to about 2000 B.C. That makes them hundreds of years older than the oldest artifacts generally considered to be Celtic — relics unearthed from Celt homelands of continental Europe, most notably around Switzerland, Austria and Germany.For a group of scholars who in recent years have alleged that the Celts, beginning from the middle of Europe, may never have reached Ireland, the arrival of the DNA evidence provides the biological certitude that the science has sometimes brought to criminal trials.“With the genetic evidence, the old model is completely shot,” John Koch, a linguist at the Center for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Wales.The senior author of the DNA research paper, Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, was reluctant to weigh in on the cultural implications, but he offered that the findings do challenge popular beliefs about Irish origins.“The genomes of the contemporary people in Ireland are older — much older — than we previously thought,” he said.

Exactly where this leaves the pervasive idea that the Irish and other people of the area are “Celtic” is unclear. It depends on the definition of Celtic.There are essentially two definitions — and two arguments.The first revolves around language. The Irish language is, like Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, part of a group that linguists have labeled Celtic. The languages share words and grammar. They seem to have emerged after a similar evolution from Indo-European. They are indisputably related, and indisputably a well-defined category.What is unclear is whether the term “Celtic” is an appropriate name for that group of languages. To be sure, some think that Celtic languages originated with the Celts on continental Europe and subsequently spread to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. This is the traditional view, and it dovetails with the idea that the Celts moved into Ireland during the Iron Age.But over the last decade, a growing number of scholars have argued that the first Celtic languages were spoken not by the Celts in the middle of Europe but by ancient people on Europe’s westernmost extremities, possibly in Portugal, Spain, Ireland or the other locales on the western edges of the British Isles.Koch, the linguist at the University of Wales, for example, proposed in 2008 that “Celtic” languages were not imports to the region but instead were developed somewhere in the British Isles or the Iberian Peninsula — and then spread eastward into continental Europe.His doubts about the traditional view arose as he was studying inscriptions on artifacts from southern Portugal. The inscriptions on those artifacts strongly resembled the languages known as Celtic, yet they dated as far back as 700 B.C. This placed Celtic languages far from the Celt homelands in the middle of Europe at a very, very early date.“What it shows is that the language that became Irish was already out there — before 700 B.C. and before the Iron Age,” Koch said. “It just didn’t fit with the traditional theory of Celtic spreading west to Britain and Iberia.” ***The second line of argument arises from archaeology and related sources. Numerous digs, most notably in Austria and Switzerland, have traced the outlines of the Celts. The artifacts offer evidence going back as far as about 800 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans also left written accounts of the Celts, and probably knew them well — the Celts sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and attacked Delphi in Greece in 279 B.C. It seemed plausible that this group that had invaded Rome had invaded Ireland as well, and in the standard view, it was this people that eventually made it to Ireland. For decades, however, archaeologists and other scholars have noted just how flimsy the evidence is for that standard account and how broad, nonetheless, is the application of the word. In 1955, an Oxford professor, J.R.R. Tolkien, better known as the author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" novels, described the popular understanding of "Celtic" in a celebrated lecture: “‘Celtic’ of any sort is ... a magic bag into which anything may be put, and out of which almost anything may come.... Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.” Moreover, in recent years, some archaeologists have proposed that the traditional story of the Celts' invasion was, in a sense, exactly wrong — the culture was not imported but exported — originating on the western edge of Europe much earlier than previously thought and spreading into the continent. In a 2001 book, Cunliffe, the Oxford scholar, argued on the basis of archaeological evidence that the flow of Celtic culture was opposite that of the traditional view — it flowed from the western edge of Europe, what he calls “the Atlantic zone” — into the rest of the continent. In many places of the Atlantic zone, he notes, people were buried in passages aligned with the solstices, a sign that they shared a unified belief system.“From about 5,000 B.C. onwards, complicated ideas of status, art, cosmology were being disseminated along the Atlantic seaways,” Cunliffe said, and that culture then spread eastward. “If we’re right, the roots of what is known as ‘Celtic’ culture go way way back in time,” Cunliffe said. “And the genetic evidence is going to be an absolute game-changer.”

If the new scholarship proves correct, exactly what to do with the word Celtic will probably be a matter of some dispute: Should it be applied to languages or cultures that, no matter how clearly defined, were largely uninfluenced by the historical Celts of continental Europe?Complicating any answer are old ethnic antagonisms: The old notions of a distinct “Celtic race” or “Irish race” have been used not just for poetic tributes, but for scorn.The famed American anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton, for example, described the Celts in 1890 as having conspicuous mental traits: “turbulent, boastful, alert, courageous, but deficient in caution, persistence and self-control, they never have succeeded in forming an independent state, and are a dangerous element in the body politic of a free country. In religion they are fanatic and bigoted, ready to swear in the words of their master rather than to exercise independent judgment.”The new evidence from genetics, however, undermine notions of a separate Irish race, describing them instead as one sliver of the European spectrum.According to the genetic research, the Irish are at the extreme end of a genetic wave that washed across Europe, a wave of migrants that swept westward from above the Black Sea across Europe about 2,500 B.C. That wave of migration had been documented in previous research led by David Reich at Harvard University, but it was unclear whether it had extended all the way to Ireland. The Y chromosome and other aspects of the DNA in the bones found behind McCuaig’s, however, link the Irish to that surge of population.“The way to think about genetic variation in Europe is that it is more of a gradient than it is of sharp boundaries," said Bradley, the DNA researcher. "Sometimes, cultural features like language and natural borders can coincide with genetics, but most times not. Genetics is fuzzy, and it doesn't follow political and cultural borders."Even so, some experts warned that the new findings will disappoint many who would prefer a simpler answer to the question Irish origins."The public will always want a place on the map and for someone to point and say, 'This where the Irish are from,' " said J.P. Mallory, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Queen's University Belfast and the author of a book, "The Origins of the Irish.""But there’s going to be no way to do that. These groups were frequently traveling east-west across Europe, from one place to another. Everyone is a mix.”

Paleontologists have dug up a 130,000-year-old mastodon skeleton that looks like it was smashed apart by humans. But they found it in America, where people were not supposed to have arrived for another 100,000 years. How could that have happened? The researchers say they think early humans must have come to America much, much earlier than anyone ever thought. They suggest that other scientists start looking for evidence of people in places they never bothered looking before.

If the conclusions are confirmed, they will turn North American archaeology upside down. "I know people will be skeptical of this because it is so surprising and I was skeptical when I first looked at the material itself. But it's definitely an archaeological site," said Steven Holen of the Center for American Paleolithic Research in South Dakota. The site includes a skeleton that looks like it was taken apart and broken with stone tools, which are left in place alongside the bones they smashed. One tusk appears to have been stuck upright into the ground. "It appears to be impossible that a mastodon could somehow force its own tusk into the underlying deposits," the research team noted in their report, published in the journal Nature.Related: DNA Links Ancient Americans to their Living Descendants The only reasonable explanation, they say, is that humans did it. Uranium dating puts the site at around 130,000 years old. "My first reaction on reading this paper was 'No. This is wrong. Something's wrong,'" said stone tool expert John McNabb of the University of Southampton in Britain. "If it does turn out to be true, it changes absolutely everything."

Current wisdom holds that modern humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than about 15,000 years ago. The oldest widely accepted site for the first Americans dates to just 13,000 years ago. The main theory is that people crossed a land bridge across the Bering Strait between modern-day Alaska and Siberia during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, and then migrated down the west coast. Related: DNA Points to Prehistoric Hanky-Panky Some other researchers have challenged this idea, but their findings are hotly disputed. If the San Diego finding holds up, it likely means that Homo erectus, Neanderthals or a related early human species, the Denisovans, crossed much, much earlier. They could have crossed on foot during a previous Ice Age much earlier than 130,000 years ago, the researchers say, or come by boat.

It's slightly possible that modern humans made the crossing, the researchers say. But no human remains were found at the site, so it's impossible to say who butchered the mastodon. "This discovery is rewriting our understanding of when humans reached the New World," Judy Gradwohl, president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum, said in a statement.

The site was first found in 1992 when road crews were putting up a sound berm — a wall of dirt to quiet traffic noise — along State Route 54 near San Diego. Paleontologists carefully excavated the mastodon skeleton, along with large, oddly-shaped rocks and the bones of other extinct animals such as dire wolf, horse, camel, mammoth and ground sloth. They also got a good estimate of how old the site is. What's now a busy road was a stream bed 130,000 years ago, the researchers said. "It was a meandering stream close to sea level," Thomas Deméré of the San Diego Natural History Museum told reporters in a conference call. "It was a very nice place to live, I would think, 130,000 years ago — not far from the coastline." Related: 400,000-Year-Old Human DNA Adds to Tangled Knowledge The smash patterns on the mastodon bones and the stones left nearby look as if humans used the stones as tools to break apart bone to use for more tools, and perhaps to get at the nutritious bone marrow inside the large leg bones, the research team said. Strangely, it does not look like they cut meat off the bones -- something that gives pause to experts like McNabb.

Most of the site was preserved under many feet of dirt and the Natural History Museum team carefully excavated and examined it by hand, documenting where each piece was and saving samples of dirt and rock alongside the bones and big stones. It was not until years later that Holen and colleagues, looking for just this kind of evidence, set out to see if humans may have been at work at the ancient site. "Of course, extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence," said Deméré. The team believes they have assembled just such evidence. They got together experts in dating ancient geological deposits and bones. They compared the stones to stone tools from the same period in other, better documented sites in Africa. They looked at various other mastodon carcasses to see if natural processes could have broken and spread the bones in the same patterns. Related: First Americans Mays Have Been Stuck in Snow for Millennia They made their own stone tools and smashed elephant bones to see if it was even possible to do it, and to see if the smashed bones looked the same. They ruled out the possibility that scavenging animals broke the bones apart or that the trucks at the road site could have done the damage.

The geology of the site strongly suggests it was buried gently, with fine-grained silt covering the bones and stones, leaving them undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. "These patterns, taken together, have led us to the conclusion that humans were processing mastodon limb bones … and that this was occurring at the site of burial … 130,000 years ago," Deméré said. James Paces, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, used radiometric dating methods to determine that the mastodon bones were 130,000 years old. "We believe we have a robust, defensible age," he said.

"The dates are truly remarkable," said University of Wollongong archaeologist Richard Fullagar, part of the study team. "But it's hard to argue with the clear and remarkable evidence that we can see in all of this material." Common wisdom holds that the first Americans didn't arrive until 13,000 years ago in what's called the Clovis culture, named after a site in New Mexico where distinctive stone tools were found in the 1920s. There are other sites in the Americas that have been dated to before 13,000 years ago, but there is debate about the conclusions. DNA evidence suggests that humans were in the Americas long before even 15,000 years ago, but there is no physical evidence to support the idea. Related: Underwater Site Shows 15,000-Year-Old Floridians And the archaeology mainstream is very unforgiving of researchers who challenge the accepted dates, said Al Goodyear of the University of South Carolina, who's been working to prove for years that stone tools found in a South Carolina site date to as long as 50,000 years ago. "There is a lot of ignorance and arrogance about just how little we know about the Western hemisphere," said Goodyear, who was not involved in the San Diego discovery. "These things are very controversial." But Goodyear says the San Diego team's evidence is compelling. "I think they've done their homework," he said, noting that Holen is one of the world's leading experts on what mastodon bones look like when they are broken naturally versus when they are smashed open by humans. "I think these sites are a wake up call to the profession," Goodyear added. Now the researchers want paleontologists and archaeologists to take another look at ancient sites to see if they can find any evidence of human activity. It won't be easy — ancient human remains are notoriously difficult to find. They also invite other scientists to examine and question their findings. That's how scientists work — by publicizing discoveries and theories and inviting their rivals to pick them apart. With enough evidence, that's how common beliefs are changed. "Well, maybe it's not completely impossible," McNabb said.